


here at the edge of the moon

by andibeth82



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Identity Issues, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Recovery, Team Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-27
Updated: 2016-08-27
Packaged: 2018-08-11 07:07:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7881376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andibeth82/pseuds/andibeth82
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wants to begin, to claw into the past of who she used to be, the faces and masks and plain facts that outline every lie, every life <i>Natasha Romanoff</i> has led in her thirty years. <i>Natalia, Nikki, Nina, Roman, Rushman, Runaway</i> – a crown of titles, of histories, adorning her forehead like the symbol of a moon goddess, the twin horns of a crescent moon rising high and clean above her brow. She wants to rip into her own skin and dig until she finds flesh, finds truth, finds the core of what makes her <i>her</i>.</p><p>[OR, Natasha Romanoff before and after Civil War: the girl she was and the girl she became.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	here at the edge of the moon

**Author's Note:**

> I had a lot of stray Natasha feelings after Civil War, and I wanted to write some good Clint and Nat stuff, and **sweetwatersong** gave me this lovely prompt in the **be_compromised** promptathon that allowed me to put my feelings into words. This is for you, darling. This is also for **beautyofsorrow** , who requested specific Hamilton lyrics for Clint/Nat.
> 
> [warnings for vague references to self-harm.]
> 
> Thanks to **gecko** for beta, always.

After Natasha leaves Tony, she marches straight out of the facility and finds the nearest coffee shop that’s not a tourist trap. She walks through the cobblestoned streets, pulling her baseball hat low over her head, avoiding stares until she finds a cafe with an open patio, its chairs spilling into cursive swirls.

“Etwas für die Dame?” _Something for the lady?_

She orders a black coffee and adds two sugar cubes, while glancing in every direction from behind her sunglasses, to make sure no one is staring at her. Stir, smile, repeat. A spy’s moment of calm.

 _Are you incapable of letting go of your ego for one goddamn second?_ she had snapped at Tony before she could stop herself, angry and annoyed and frustrated at the world, at herself, at the fact that her best friend and partner was now locked in an underwater prison.

It occurs to her as she sips her coffee that it’s a question she might as well be asking herself.

 

(The Black Widows infiltrate Wakanda. Natalia doesn’t go with them, because Natalia is too young, and Natalia is too inexperienced.

“This is not your purpose, _Natache_ ,” says her instructor.

Natalia wonders what her purpose is. Natalia finds out that her purpose is apparently to be shot with a tranquilizer arrow when she misses the second roof she’s trying to jump to while fleeing from the man with the bow. He gets her in the thigh and she buckles halfway across the sky.

 _You are weak, Natalia_ , she thinks as she falls. _Lazy. You are better than this_.

She realizes while she’s falling that she doesn’t want to die, so instead, she fights. She grabs hold of a window ledge that she’s close to, fingers clawing at its edges, before she loses grip on that, too. She launches her body against a fire escape, landing hard on her back, rolling down on the iron stairs and twisting her limbs until she comes to rest a few stories below. She breaks a leg. She curses loudly, because she can’t crawl away.

He approaches her with a swear and a shout; she spits in his face, she calls him every bad name she can think of, she swears violently in Russian and every other language she knows until he shuts her up by backhanding her across the jaw. She’s so surprised by the fact he’s actually retaliating that she stops screaming which, for the moment, allows her to dumbly lower her guard, and allows him to jab her in the neck with a needle that burns.

Later, on something called a helicarrier en route to America, she wakes up and vomits onto the floor. He approaches her with his palms up after she’s done dry heaving and it’s only then that she realizes he’s set her leg with the help of some medics that look like they’d rather be anywhere else than in her vicinity.

“If you’re scared --”

She snarls at him, her throat still aching with fire. It’s the only thing she knows how to do, because he doesn’t deserve her words. He shrugs, leaves, and Natalia is satisfied, until he walks back in her direction carrying a mug of what she recognizes as hot coffee.

“They say you shouldn’t drink caffeine after sustaining serious injuries. You know, blood loss and all that. Something tells me those rules doesn’t apply to you.”

Her tongue is coated with tiredness and hunger, and she can smell the strong brew wafting from inside the cup. She wants it badly, she wants to indulge in his kindness, but there are no words for kindness. There never have been. Kindness was a slap on the wrist, a broken arm, a knife to the face. Kindness was Yulia getting snatched from her pillow and shot in the forehead for stealing bread, because someone had told a lie to keep Natalia’s misdeeds a secret.

“Well.” He keeps up his one-sided conversation when she doesn’t respond. “Hopefully, you’ll like America. Land of the free, you know. Home of the brave.”

Natalia has never been free. Natalia has certainly never had a home. Natalia -- well, they told her she was brave, but she never believed them, not when she was hiding in crevices with shaking limbs, a dark-haired man by the name of _Soldat_ reassuring her that she’ll survive. She snarls again, both offended and angered that he dares to think she can find something in this country that prides itself on privilege, a world that probably didn’t know what it felt like to tie little girls to beds or send seven-year-olds into war with metal hearts and trigger-ready hands.

“This will never be my home,” she says, and he shrugs again.

“We’ll see.”)

 

A tall man with a floppy hat stops in front of her, causing a shadow to fall over her face. She tenses, old habits flaring up, and her hand shifts to grasp to the small handgun hidden in her jacket pocket.

“Excuse me. I’m sorry, but you are American, correct?”

Natasha nods, not lowering her sunglasses, and the man smiles. Natasha can tell it’s a smile born out of genuine relief, and she feels her guard fall just slightly.

“I thought so. Might you tell me how to get to Brandenburg? I do apologize, but I lost my directions a few blocks back, and I can’t seem to get my bearings. My wife always said I was a terrible tourist. I should’ve listened to her before I came out here alone.”

She breathes out. Smiles. Points the man down the road with a few additional words of encouragement and advice on how to get to the train station.

She takes another sip of coffee and stares out at the busy street.

 

* * *

  

Six days, four hours and twenty-nine minutes after Natalia Romanova gets brought into SHIELD, her self-proclaimed savior shows up at her cell door eating an apple and waving gaily, like he’s the goddamn hero of the universe who’s been honored with a parade route.

“So, here’s the deal,” he starts without even bothering to properly introduce himself, leaning against the doorway. “You passed all the tests -- well, all the tests meaning, like, you’re not going to kill anyone. We don’t think. Don’t worry, SHIELD’s psych doctors leave a lot to be desired, but I trust you. Anyway, your leg is healing. They’re gonna give you a walking cast cause it’s really more like a fracture than a break, and you seem pretty stable, so I think we’re gonna be able to get you out of here soon. Whaddya say?”

She notices that his clothing is covered in coffee stains and that his jeans are ripped at the knees and really, what she wants to say is that she’s seen homeless men who look more put together than Clint Barton, SHIELD’s apparent top agent and most excellent sharpshooter.

“You still wanna kill me?”

Clint shrugs, nonplussed. “No, not really. Never did.”

“Pity. I could’ve been a pretty corpse.”

“Yeah, but then I wouldn’t have gotten to offer you my apple.” He holds out his hand and she makes a face, shaking her head.

“I’d rather starve.”

“Delicacies of America, Natalia.” He shoves the rest of the apple in his mouth and grins like he’s one of the animals she used to stare at during fancy dinners. As he walks away, Natalia finds herself thinking that his ass is nice, and it’s the one consolation she’ll allow, because she’s refusing to think of him as anything else except an annoying, too-good prick.

Nick Fury is not annoying. Neither is Maria Hill. Nick Fury looks at her like he can read all of her secrets, as if he’s sizing her up to figure out whether or not she can be trusted. Maria Hill looks at her like she’s dangerous, and Natalia doesn’t blame her. It’s not like she came with a warning label. There was no disclaimer for who she was. What you got with Natalia Romanova was, well, what you got.

“They’re not really as bad as they look,” Clint explains as he walks with her from her cell to the cafeteria. “I mean, Fury...you gotta figure out how to read the guy. I was convinced he hated me for years. But also, I probably put him back on his anxiety meds when I joined, so I get it. Hill’s a little different. You’d think she’s no fun and games, right? But get this: every Friday night, she goes to this bar in Greenpoint with her girlfriends and they play the jukebox really loudly and get drunk off two dollar Coors Lights. Oh, and she also has an entire library full of books. Did you know she can actually recite Chaucer’s Old English? I’m all for appreciating literary knowledge, but you couldn’t get me to read those stories if you paid me.”

Natalia sits through his babbling, largely because she’s not quite sure what to say or how to react; she’s not used to people talking to her so openly and she’s never found herself in a situation she didn’t know how to handle. To say she didn’t know how to handle Clint Barton would be an understatement.

But he’s good for her, or so he says. So does Fury. So does Hill. They tell her she’s supposed to work with him as a partner and in response, she locks herself in her room for two days without eating because Natalia doesn’t _do_ partners. When she finally emerges, starved and still angry, she grabs a knife from underneath her pillow and marches to where she knows he’s currently relaxing in an old, abandoned office. She chucks the knife at his head after walking in the door; Clint glances up just in time to see her and then manages to duck nimbly out of the way. The knife lands harmlessly in the wall behind him.

“Seriously?” Clint looks askance and Natalia, having been unprepared for his reaction (she didn’t know _what_ reaction she expected, really; she didn’t want to actually kill him but she was so angry she didn’t know what else to do), finds herself at a loss for words.

“I wanted --”

“Look, I don’t know how it worked in the Red Room, Natasha. Natalia. Whatever. But if you want something from me, you use your words and you ask. None of this ‘throwing a knife in my face’ kind of thing.” He stands up and eyes her, completely serene and not the least bit concerned about his apparent brush with death. “Got it?”

She stands stunned in place, hating that she’s just been schooled by someone who she doesn’t even _like_ , and then goes to pummel the life out of a punching bag until her fingers are raw and bleeding and her legs can’t support her anymore. Sometime later, when she’s crawling back to her room on limbs that feel like jelly, chest heaving as if she’s swam a thousand miles with no pauses for air, she opens the door to find him sitting at her small desk.

“Natasha.”

“What?” Clint looks at her over the pages of Neil Gaiman's  _Neverwhere_ and Natasha clenches her teeth.

“Don’t call me Natalia anymore. I’m Natasha.”

Clint nods slowly, lowering the book onto his lap. “Okay. Natasha.”

She walks to the small bed in the corner, lying down and immediately curling up on her side, away from his face. She waits and waits and waits, forcing herself to stay awake despite the desire to pass out, and Clint remains silent, the sharp turn of thin book paper the only sound for hours.

 

(“She threw a knife at my head,” Clint says when he calls to check in, finding a spare moment away from Wanda and the world. Natasha can’t see him but she hears the annoyance in his voice.

“People who like you tend to do that,” she replies, feeling comforted.)

 

Their first mission together is weapons recon in Madripoor. She’s supposed to watch his six and suss out the perimeter, because she’s good at hacking and being stealth. He’s supposed to take on mercenaries, because he’s good at shooting and seeing from a distance. Natasha doesn’t want to admit they work well together because they don’t (they don’t, they absolutely _don’t_ , he didn’t have her back just so she could turn around and have his; he didn’t call out danger so she could turn around and protect herself). But she does admit that Clint being competent in the field makes her job easier. They’re on a quinjet home four hours after Clint has tied the last rope around a thug’s hand, sending him off to SHIELD custody, and Natasha examines the dried blood caked around a cut on her arm while watching Clint nurse what she’s pretty sure is more than one bruised rib he won’t admit to.

“What now?” Natasha asks, eyeing his swollen upper lip and black eye. “Are we patched up by your friends? Do we get the good drugs?”

“Hell, no,” Clint says, looking almost offended. “Now, we go drinking.”

He doesn’t take her to a SHIELD watering hole or a neighborhood watering hole or even a touristy watering hole. Instead, he drives them around Jamaica and settles into a bar near the E train and the Long Island Rail Road, one that has the Yankees game playing on at least four big screens while the rumble of the subway shakes the ground beneath them every five minutes. Natasha watches Clint dive happily into three beers and a mountain full of onion rings smothered in mozzarella, and she sips her first Stella Artois while Clint orders another pitcher of Yuengling.

“I hate beer,” she says as the carbonated liquid slides down her throat with the same flatness as her emotions.

“So don’t drink beer,” Clint says, reaching for his own glass. “Tab’s on me, Natasha. Well, SHIELD, really. But whatever. Order whatever the hell you want.”

“I’m also not carrying you home,” she informs him over the din of the bar crowd, after telling herself she is not the least bit curious about how onion rings taste with cheese. Clint makes a _pshaw_ sound.

“You sound like Laura.”

“Who the hell is Laura?”

Clint grins cheekily. “My wife.”

 

* * *

 

Two months after she’s brought into SHIELD, while puttering around in the seaside village of Camogli, she ducks into a small cafe advertising new flavors of cookies and fresh coffee. There are muffins and cupcakes and sandwiches, but Natasha chooses two chocolate chip scones dotted with crystallized diamonds and brings them outside, where she sits next to him on a small bed of rocks overlooking the water.

“Am I the first person you haven’t killed?” she asks, because she is honestly curious. Clint laughs, spewing chewed up bread out of his mouth.

“Hardly. They send me on these assignments because they know I’m too soft.”

This is their second mission. She feels strange. She feels prickly in her skin, like she’s trying to be someone else on top of the person she already was made to be, the one she doesn’t even want to be. She has a new leather suit that hugs her body like a glove, constricting her skin the same way a man with a red star on his arm once constricted her breathing. She has a new name but it’s an old one, too, a Black Widow mantle that she’s adopted as a singular title rather than sharing it with her sisters -- because in America, there aren’t Red Rooms or Madames or little girls who draw blood with their fingernails. She has the emblem of an eagle on her right shoulder, a symbol of America’s land of the free and home of the brave bullshit Clint liked to harp on. She is not American. She is not Natalia. None of these things feel like her. But they don’t _not_ feel like her, either, and she doesn’t know how to reconcile that.

 

(“Who do you want me to be?” she asks Steve Rogers as they drive to New Jersey in a stolen car. She’s just had her past flash in front of her eyes with Odessa, and Fury’s just _died_ , and so she’s piling on all the layers, every single on that she can grab. She’ll give him the benefit of thinking he can break at least one, despite the fact he hasn’t even come close to cracking the surface.

Steve looks at her and says, “a friend,” and Natasha thinks of a seaside ledge in Italy, of Clint’s wry smile, and of _they send me on these assignments because they know I’m too soft._ She thinks of Nick Fury holding her arm like the father she never had when he brings her reports of the last of the Red Room girls being exterminated, when he watches her look at photos and videos of people and buildings she remembers as if it were yesterday.

SHIELD, too, will burn, the last of her family melted into oblivion. Natasha doesn’t know this yet, but even still, she swallows past the arrow necklace sitting at her throat and feels sad.

“There’s a chance you might be in the wrong business, Rogers.”)

 

“It’s not safe, is it?” Natasha asks as she looks out over the water and eats her scone, finding the view strangely serene and somewhat calming. “To have a heart?”

“Probably not,” Clint concedes, dusting crumbs off his hands. He picks up his bow, which has been lying at his feet. “I’ll probably pay for it one day. But, better to have some heart than none at all, right?”

She doesn’t know if that’s an answer specifically directed towards her, and she tries not to think about it.

Natasha tries to shed her skin a day after they come back from Italy. Clint finds her in the bathroom with hair that’s streaked blonde and brown and orange, a terrifying burst of sun, blades broken from plastic razors among the carnage littering the floor.

“Jesus Christ,” he says, staring at the empty boxes of dye and the state of the bathroom, and Natasha doesn’t even try to fight him when he touches her, because she knows she’s fucked up. He doesn’t ask her to explain herself, but he makes her sit stationary on the toilet while he bandages the deeper cuts on her wrist and mops up the blood and hair dye from the floor with wet paper towels.

“If you wanted to be Winnifred Sanderson for Halloween, you could’ve just asked. My wife has a ton of dress-up wigs.”

“Winnie -- who?” she asks hoarsely, her flesh tingling. She had tried to cut it all off, she had tried to scrub her past away to figure out who she could be, and he had forced it back onto her as if he wanted her to keep the parts of herself that she hated. It’s the only thing she can think about, and meanwhile, he’s running his mouth about something she assumes is a stupid pop culture reference inherent of America.

“You’ve never watched _Hocus Pocus_?” Clint sounds horrified. “Oh, man. I’ve got some work to do.”

 

* * *

 

After she leaves the cafe, she calls Laura, because she knows she needs to. She doesn’t tell her the details -- that Clint’s in prison, that he’s in a _maximum security_ prison somewhere in the middle of the goddamn Arctic Ocean -- because that would be irresponsible to say out loud and it would also leave her a worried mess. And anyway, Natasha isn’t about to drop that bomb on a woman who has already been through hell and back where her husband was concerned.

She’s been away from the farm for two weeks, four days, and six hours, because at some point, she started keeping track of when she wasn’t with his family. Natasha asks about Cooper first, because she always does: he’s excelling in sports and he’s thinking of running track, if he can make tryouts. Natasha listens to Laura go on and on and on -- Nathaniel is starting to walk, he babbles continuously, and he’s looking more like Clint every day. He likes carrots best, and also pieces of wheat bread, which is apparently what Laura liked once upon a time when she was a baby. Lila’s been reading more; her teachers called Laura and told her that her child was at a certain skill level, one unheard of for six-year-olds.

Natasha swallows down the fear that still haunts her, after all these years, at hearing the words “at a certain skill level.”

“Do you know when you’ll be home?” Laura asks when the updates finally stop, and for a moment, it feels like any other phone call.

Natasha swallows. “Soon.” She looks up and around, nibbling on her thumbnail. “I’m still in Germany.”

Laura pauses and when she speaks, her voice is caught somewhere between resignation and worry. “He’s in trouble, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” says Natasha, because she doesn’t like to lie to Laura if she knows the severity of something. “He is.”

“Oh.” Laura’s voice is soft, a little sad. “Is it bad?”

“Yes,” Natasha repeats. There’s another spell of silence.

“Are you going to go save him?”

“Of course I am.”

“Good.” Laura launches into another tirade of bad housekeeping and children who still pee on the floor when she’s not looking, and Natasha finishes her coffee and continues to wander through the streets.

 

(Sometimes, Natasha remembers that fight in the belly of the helicarrier. She remembers Clint’s punches, the way his knife flashed too close to her eye. She remembers twisting his arm, the cry of pain that was mostly Loki but also Clint, the whine of a man struggling to break through the cracks of a cage that’s held him hostage for far too long.

“Tasha?”

She punches him the way Laura once punched a man out in the parking lot when he tried to get too close to Lila; the way Cooper once punched a hole in his bedroom wall when he was angry because he had his dad’s temper through and through. The punch feels good. It feels earned. She punches him and he falls, sprawled out on the floor, legs wide, body limp.

 _There is no glory in winning the battle_ , Madame had told her when she watched the girls in the Red Room limp back battered and bruised, trying to placate Natalia about the fact she had not been chosen for this particular mission. The Dora Milaje were not for her. She was to be trained for something else. Something more important.

She does not want to be Loki, power hungry and greedy, like all of her sisters. She does not need to rule the world, and she doesn’t want a purpose beyond the man she has just saved.

There is no glory in winning the battle, and Natasha thinks that’s just fine.)

 

She window shops in boredom until the sun starts to lower in the sky and eventually, she ducks into an alley behind a busy restaurant, hiding in the shadows while ignoring the rumble in her stomach that comes from smelling fresh roasted vegetables and pan-seared fish. It’s been too long since she’s eaten a real meal, but that’s the least of her worries right now.

She checks her watch. She shuffles her feet. She bums a cigarette from an unsuspecting passerby but finds the pull in her lungs unsatisfying, unlike the days when she used to sit on balconies belonging to statesmen and vagabonds and blow smoke into a sky that seemed like it had all the answers. Eventually, a broad-shouldered man steps into her vision, his black clothing making him almost indistinguishable against the night.

“Fancy finding you here,” Natasha says, stubbing out her cigarette.

“I could say the same.” Steve gets closer and looks her up and down, eyeing her with scrutiny and a careful brow raise. “You’ve been through a lot, Natasha.”

“So have you.”

She doesn’t ask him about Barnes. She doesn’t need to. She knows he wouldn’t be here if his friend wasn’t somewhere secure, if he wasn’t considered safe. She knows that because she knows where Steve’s loyalties lie, because Natasha’s lie in the same place, just with a different person.

Steve nods. “You don’t have to come with me.”

“I know.” Natasha thinks of Clint, and of Laura, and of Cooper and Lila and Nathaniel, and of a farmhouse bathed in bright sunlight and horse-shaped wind chimes.

“But I want to.”

 

* * *

  

Two days after Natasha tries to make herself someone else entirely, Clint knocks on her door and says, “I’ve thought of something that will help you. I mean, if you trust me.”

Natasha doesn’t trust anyone, but she says yes, anyway. Clint brings Natasha to the farm on a Sunday in March, when the birds are singing and the sun is shining in a comically picture-perfect way that Natasha would have expected from the storybooks she never read. Laura walks out of the house and tells Clint, “Cooper peed on the porch again.”

Clint exclaims, “that’s my boy!” with sheer delight and Natasha wonders if Laura was a mercenary in another life; for a brief moment she gets excited because maybe she has something in common with this woman after all -- you don’t just _learn_ how to give death glares like that. But then Laura is smiling and laughing and shaking her head in a measure of forgiveness that Natasha thinks is downright insane, for a lot of reasons.

“Every day, he figures out another way to prove that he’s related to you,” she says, kissing him as he comes up the porch. There’s a hug that’s far too intimate for Natasha to feel comfortable with, but this is Clint’s _wife_ , she reminds herself. Not some sort of cover or some pretend facade. People, normal people, they hug their wives and they kiss them and they put their hands on their faces in truly intimate measures of love.

“We moved out here before Clint got embedded in SHIELD,” Laura offers over baked macaroni and cheese when they sit down for lunch together. “My family lives a few states over, and we didn’t want to go too far when we settled down, since we knew we wanted kids.”

Natasha picks at the breadcrumbs on top of sauce-laden noodles, feeling extremely out of place. People, normal people, they give up information about themselves without thinking about who they might be talking to. “How did you guys meet?”

Laura exchanges a glance with Clint. “He came through here while he was in the circus, when I was in college,” Laura explains. “The Amazing Hawkeye. Quite the act, if you know what I mean. The crew stayed overnight and a few of them went for drinks in town. Being the sly and rebellious young adult that I was, I _may_ have sussed out where some of the carnies might be going, hoping he would be there.”

“In case you couldn’t tell, it worked,” Clint says, shoving a huge forkful of macaroni in his mouth.

“Well, it was a lucky guess,” Laura says with a shrug, picking up her glass of iced tea.

“Don’t let her fool you,” Clint says with a grin. “There are only so many dive bars here.”

Natasha watches his body relax, the lines around his face evening out as he digs into his food. She watches Clint laugh and smile, his body leaning comfortably against the chair; every so often he puts his hand on Laura’s thigh and then leaves it there until she makes him laugh again.

“So what else did I miss while I was gone? Don’t tell me the little rascal started teething.”

“Oh, no,” Laura says with a roll of her eyes. “It’s much worse than that,” and then she’s launching into a colorful discussion of the latest ways Cooper has decided to torment her while she’s left him alone, including screaming at the top of his lungs for no reason.

 _This is his home_ , Natasha realizes suddenly, because she always thought Clint belonged on the street where he picked her up, or in the hallways of the organization that he spent all his time in. It made sense, from what she had seen, but it was here that he lost all the layers Natasha had started to learn about.

After lunch, Clint formally introduces Natasha to Cooper, who delights in trying to touch Natasha’s multi-colored hair that she hasn’t bothered to fix. Later, Laura gives her a plastic bag from CVS that contains a box of crimson dye.

“I wasn’t sure what color you wanted,” she admits as she holds the bag out. “But Clint said when he met you, you were a redhead, so I figured that was a safe bet. There are towels in the closet by the bathroom. It’s okay if you make a mess. We do have a baby, after all. We probably do about five loads of wash a day.”

Natasha nods in thanks and stays in the bathroom for three hours; two of those hours are spent holding the open box of dye in her hand and wondering if she should add another layer to the skin she’s still trying to shed, one of those hours is spent carefully washing and applying the color branded “Revlon Colorsilk Bright Auburn.” She expects someone to come check on her or bother her, but no one does.

“Hey, that’s the Natasha I know,” Clint says when she finally emerges with wet hair, wearing one of Laura’s maternity shirts and a pair of Clint’s oversized sweatpants. He’s holding Cooper in two arms, the baby’s fat cheek squished against his bare chest. Laura is reading a book, and smiles over her reading glasses. Natasha wonders where she fits into all of this, and as if on cue, Laura makes a space for her on the couch, shifting closer to her husband.

She sits down. She is suddenly not Natalia, Red Room born. She is not even Natasha, SHIELD made. Here, under the canopy of Laura’s encouraging smile and Clint’s boisterous fatherhood, she is something else. Something different. Something human. She doesn’t let the feeling go unnoticed.

“What does this mean?” Natasha asks when they leave the farm to go back to New York, Clint piloting the quinjet with ease. “For us?”

Clint looks puzzled. “Nothing,” he says. “Why would it mean anything?”

Natasha finds it hard, still, to talk about _why_. Because in any other situation, a married man with a happy family would mean death. Because in any other situation, she would be banned from even _thinking_ that she could try to be a part of his life.

“Because you have other loyalties,” she says finally, not knowing how else to describe what Laura and Cooper mean in her world, the only world she knows. Clint snorts.

“Trust me, Laura’s, uh...used to the fact that I’m a little open with work,” he says sheepishly. “A few years ago, we took in an old circus buddy when he got into a bad place. I called her when I met you and said that maybe one day I would take you home. Just happened sooner rather than later.”

“Oh.” Natasha is slowly beginning to understand the way Clint Barton works, and she’s not sure how she feels about it. No one has ever welcomed her into any life with so much care and trust.

“Laura’s my wife, but you’re still my partner,” he continues. “And I’d still give my life for you. I mean, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“It’s not,” she says quickly, but she wonders if she’s lying. “I can take care of myself.”

“Of course you can,” Clint says, steering the jet through the clouds.

 

(She watches Tony Stark destroy himself little by little, bit by bit, and she wants to break her cover and tell him that they have more in common than he would think.

_We were both forced into legacies we didn’t ask for. We were both burdened by a history that we couldn’t live up to. We were both left out to die alone, in the cold._

He worried about her. She never told anyone, not even Clint, that after Monaco, he pulled her aside and asked if she was okay.

Natalie Rushman looks at Tony Stark and says, “I’m fine, and I’m more concerned with the fact that you just caused major damage to your company’s reputation.”

Natasha Romanoff thinks, _I can take care of myself._

Natasha Romanoff thinks, _I can take care of myself_ , and watches Tony trip further down the rabbit hole, like a train speeding towards an inevitable crash, and she sees herself.)

 

* * *

 

Natasha receives a dossier on Sharon Carter, Agent 13, niece of Margaret “Peggy” Carter, daughter of Harrison and Amanda Carter, and quickly reads the file front to back while waiting at an overpriced sushi restaurant on the Upper East Side.

“You’re a redhead,” Sharon says when she arrives ten minutes after noon, taking the seat across from Natasha.

“You’re a blonde,” she responds because Sharon’s file had showed her as a brunette. Carter smiles.

“Helps with the cover. Also, they told me when he woke up at SHIELD that there was a brunette nurse that looked like my aunt. I didn’t think it was appropriate to look similar, even if he doesn’t know who I am.”

“Smart,” Natasha assesses, because it is. She pushes her sunglasses up her nose and an envelope across the table. “This is your apartment, in Alexandria. We’ve rented you the unit next to Rogers. I hope you’re okay with old music at all times of the night.”

“I work late,” Sharon says with a toss of her hair. She takes the envelope and pockets it. “Anything else I should know about this assignment?”

_Know your orders. Reassess. Receive._

_Good morning, Soldat._

_Ready to comply._

Natasha regards Sharon carefully. “Keep your distance. Don’t get lost in your cover. If you need me, contact Nick Fury. He’ll know how to get in touch.” She pushes back her chair, leaving the other woman alone at the cafe.

 

(After HYDRA, Natasha goes south. She tells Steve, “I blew all my covers. I have to find new ones.” She goes to California first, wanders through the national parks and museums, combing for answers she’s not sure she wants to find. After that, she continues to wander, making her way across the country by various means of travel. She hitchhikes to Santa Fe and tries horseback riding at a ranch. She takes a train to Sedona and tries white water rafting. She rents her own car and drives to Austin and samples an overabundance of barbeque food. When she starts to feel too American, she jets over to an old bolthole in Warsaw, surprised and relieved to find that it’s still intact, if not dusty and filthy and abandoned. She spends the day wandering around a bazaar and buys dozens of useless clothing and food.

Clint is in deep cover in Hamburg and unable to receive messages the proper way, though she knows he’s found out about SHIELD’s fall. She dyes her hair black in a fit of impulse, shears it all off up to her ears in the dirty bathroom of the safehouse, and sends Clint a picture, because it’s her way of letting him know she’s okay. He responds with, “you look like you belong in a goth club,” and she makes a face at the phone.

She calls Laura while sunbathing on a beach. Laura doesn’t answer, because it’s three-thirty in the morning back in the States, but Natasha knows she has promises to keep and responsibilities to adhere to, and this is one of them.

“It’s me,” Natasha says when the message instructing her to leave a beep ends. “I’m alive.”

Hours later, Laura will call her back. Natasha will let the call go to voicemail, because it’s the responsible thing to do, because she needs to keep up her walls for a little bit longer.

“That’s all I needed to know.”)

 

Natasha sends a message when she gets to Frankfurt, where Sharon is currently placed on assignment. Five hours later, she’s walking briskly down a busy street, only paying attention when the other woman falls easily into step beside her.

“From SHIELD Level One to the CIA.” Natasha says when they finally stop walking at an intersection. “Your aunt would be proud.”

Sharon smiles halfheartedly. “She gave me my first gun, you know. Aunt Peggy. Other girls got Tiffany necklaces and cruises when they turned eighteen. Peggy gave me a firearm. She wouldn’t let me use it until I turned twenty-one, though.”

“You start young,” Natasha says mildly, running a hand through hair that’s getting too long. “It gets you, in the end.”

“Does it?”

Natasha doesn’t know, because she was given blades and guns before she was even given a name. But Sharon had started young, and Sharon had protected Steve, and Sharon had stood up against HYDRA, and now Sharon vowed to protect the world.

“If you’re ever back in New York, we should get coffee.”

Sharon gives a tentative grin. “I’d like that. I don’t have many female friends. You know, the whole CIA workaholic thing, plus being a bit of a legend to people who actually know who I am.”

“My only real female friend aside from a cat that hangs out at my apartment sometimes is someone else’s wife,” Natasha offers, because she understands the legend thing, even though it’s not a good legend like Sharon’s. Sharon laughs, folding her arms against her chest.

“I’m not sure how you did it.”

Natasha swivels her head. “Did what?”

Sharon shrugs. “Survived.”

Natasha’s lungs are suddenly tight, spots of black behind her eyes when she blinks, and for a moment, the commotion around her fades into silence.

“I don’t know,” she says, even though she thinks she does. “I guess I found a loophole.”

 

* * *

 

Steve finds out where the Raft is held, because Steve has resources, and Natasha mans the logistics of the rescue mission, because Natasha has the hacking skills and the expertise necessary to make sure they get in and out undetected.

“Just like a few years ago, except you’re not trying to find me a date,” says Steve. “Heard from the Hulk?”

“No,” Natasha answers calmly. “Heard from Sharon?”

“Not since she abandoned me in Berlin.”

“Hmmm. That’s sad. Maybe she wasn’t ready for an old man’s body.”

“Harsh, Natasha.”

Natasha doesn’t think it’s _that_ harsh, because at some point, she’s actually given real relationship advice to a 95-year-old Star Spangled icon when she still isn’t even sure she believes in being All-American.

“I absolutely have faith in your ability to cultivate a healthy, sexual relationship with another woman,” she decides as she hits a few buttons on the tablet she’s carrying. He doesn’t have his shield with him and between that and the all-black wardrobe, he looks like he’s going against the law in every way possible. “Also, I think Peggy would be happy to see her grand-niece with someone so honorable.”

Steve snorts. “Yeah, well. I don’t think I’m a very good role model anymore.” It’s the last thing he says before he jumps from the quinjet after going over where the cells are located, how many guards are keeping watch, and where Ross has stored all of their gear.

Natasha considers his words and thinks about what Tony said in Berlin, and thinks, _neither am I_.

 

(Clint corners her while she’s working out in the gym and gives her a kiss on the cheek and a big grin and a piece of paper, and says, “Welcome to Level Seven. According to the Council, you’re now officially not only my partner, but one of SHIELD’s best assets.”

Natasha lets herself a little bit of pride at his words, and thanks him with a smirk and a shoulder jab. The next morning, Natasha goes to Odessa, because there are rumors that the Winter Soldier is there.

Natasha goes to Odessa, because she gets frustrated and scared of being too complacent as Natasha Romanoff, SHIELD agent and partner of Clint Barton, and thinks maybe she can still find her past.

Her past finds her, and the Winter Soldier looks at her and points a gun and says _Soldat, Natalia._ Something snaps inside her brain and she is not Natasha, and she sees nothing but red and white noise and hears nothing but ballet tunes and gunshots. When Clint finds her on the side of the road, her engineer shot straight through, she’s also bleeding profusely. The moment he touches her, she reacts, screaming and clawing and biting; she’s both dripping in sweat from infection and fever but thanks to her conditioning, she’s fighting with vicious strength that she knows should be unheard of.

Natalia is not ashamed of her skill. Natalia has been trained for all of this, because it doesn’t matter if you are bleeding or hurt or tired. You fight, and you fight to kill, and you fight to win. You fight, or you die.

When she wakes up, she’s in a bed that’s too big and plush to be her own or Clint and Laura’s. Her head feels like it weighs ten pounds and her eyes hurt and her throat hurts, and there’s a pain her stomach that feels like a thousand knives are stabbing at her flesh.

“Rough night,” comes a voice from her left and she turns to see Clint sitting in a chair. He’s shirtless, his boxers hanging off his love handles. There’s a deep red scratch along his shoulder, bruises across his cheekbones, and a black eye that’s more purple than maroon. Natasha shudders, her brain a blank memory that she knows comes with being conditioned and broken, and forgets all about the bandaged injury she can see on her abdomen when she pulls the covers aside.

“Did I...did I do that?”

Clint shrugs, getting up. “Do you remember doing it?”

Natasha shakes her head mutely and Clint nods.

“Okay, then. So, it doesn’t matter. I mean, it wasn’t you, anyway, right?”

It wouldn’t have mattered to Natalia, daughter of Black Widows and Madames and the Soviet Union, the Winter Soldier’s prize. But it matters to Natasha, partner of Clint and friend of Clint and Laura, Level Seven SHIELD agent devoted to protecting the greater good. He helps her sit up slowly and for the first time she sees past Clint’s body to the balcony and open window. There are snow-capped mountains outside, a clear blue sky and a breeze of chilly air.

“Where are we?”

Clint makes a noise as he clicks his tongue in his mouth. “The Swiss Alps.”

“ _The_ _Swiss Alps_?”

“Well, I couldn’t exactly take you home to Laura in that state. Not when you were programmed to practically kill me. What kind of person do you think I am?”

 _I think --_ Natasha stops, because she realizes she doesn’t know, because years ago that answer would have been completely different, and Natasha learns this about Clint Barton that day: he is selfless and soft, but he has boundaries, and he respects those boundaries while still caring about you in every way possible.

“The last time I saw mountains like this was in Vienna,” she tells him softly, staring out the window. “I’ve never looked at the mountains before. Not as someone who was free. I was always doing someone else’s bidding. I could never enjoy anywhere I traveled to, no matter how beautiful it was.”

“Well.” Clint nods towards the window. “I don’t know how romantic it is given that you’re sitting here with a gunshot wound to your stomach, but there you go. These are your mountains, Natasha.”

He takes her hand and holds it for a long time, not letting go.)

 

Natasha goes to the Raft, because Clint is there.

She monitors Steve from a distance, holding the quinjet at bay, opening doors and giving directions; she ignores the gut-chewing sensation in her stomach until heavy footsteps on the landing pad signal a return.

Sam comes first, followed by Scott Lang, who looks both confused and grateful. Clint comes last, holding a shaking Wanda in his arms, and the girl looks smaller and more fragile than Natasha remembers. There’s an ache that blossoms behind still-healing ribs and even though it’s been years, she finds herself wondering if he held her like that when he took her in after rescuing her from the streets, after he shot her. The pain in her chest intensifies as he gets closer, but she doesn’t react, and she lets him attend to Wanda while she concentrates on piloting the quinjet, getting them away from the Raft area and into the safety of the dark sky, a black hole lit only by the delicate light of the quinjet’s wings.

“So.” Clint’s voice when he finally approaches her is tired and gravely, as if he hasn’t spoken for weeks. “Where’d you run to this time?”

“What makes you think I ran anywhere except to find you?” she asks, curbing a smile. Clint raises an eyebrow.

“I know that face. That’s the classic ‘Natasha has an internal dilemma and went to run across Europe’ face.”

Natasha stares at the windshield, unsure whether she wants to laugh or cry at his accurate assessment. “I stayed in Berlin. I called Laura. I waited for Rogers. I went to all the good bakeries.”

“Okay.” He nods. “That’s good. How’s Laura?”

“Worried. But now that I can tell her that her husband is a convicted felon out of prison, she’ll be a lot less worried. How’s Wanda?”

“Sleeping.” He casts a glance over his shoulder, where Wanda is curled into the corner, a blanket spread over her shoulders. “Ross put her in some sort of straitjacket. She hasn’t eaten in days. She was so broken down, she couldn’t even move when we finally got her out.”

Natasha doesn’t say anything, because she doesn’t know what to say, because at some point in the past few hours, her life and her found family has gone from solid to falling apart all over again.

“Is it my fault?” she asks softly, Tony’s words playing over and over in her mind. Maybe she _had_ made the wrong choice. Maybe her ego had been at play more than she had realized. Maybe, despite all the makings and remakings and homemade meals and intimate touches and bedtime stories and bullets that she took for other people, she never really _had_ shed Natalia, the double agent, the slippery girl of Russia who looked out only for herself.

“It’s all of our faults,” Clint says, and then he nods towards the windshield. “Look.” His breath whispers against her skin like a gentle breeze. “Mountains.”

Natasha narrows her gaze, zeroing in on jagged snowcapped points. She reaches over and takes his hand.

_Forgiveness._

 

* * *

 

(In an underground HYDRA bunker in New Jersey, Steve Rogers pulls her from the wreckage of a thousand heavy bricks.

In the scarred battlefield of Sokovia, Bruce Banner as The Hulk carries her away from a falling city, where she has laid her heart bare without realizing it.

In an alley in Croatia, Clint Barton picks her up, broken leg and all, and ushers her away from her past.

She has been picked up by all of them. They will continue to pick her up.

She will return the favor.)

 

* * *

  

Six months after Odessa, Natasha is up to her elbows in paperwork when Clint stomps loudly into the kitchen of his Brooklyn apartment.

“What’s up?” She tries not to be too annoyed, because it _is_ his apartment, and at some point along the way she’s pretty much adopted it as her own, down to the toothbrush in the bathroom and the spare clothes in the dresser and the vanilla bean coffee in the cupboard. Clint slaps a brochure down on the table.

“Outer Banks. Wanna come?”

“What the hell is there for me to do in the _Outer Banks_?”

Clint shrugs. “Swimming. Sunbathing. Water skiing. Honestly, Laura’s probably going to make me wrangle Cooper the whole time while she sits on the beach with a bottle of wine, and I’m not going to be able to say no.”

“That sounds terrible,” Natasha remarks, because it actually sounds pretty good. But for Natasha, vacations often involved things like sex and long dinners and sometimes murder. They didn’t involve things like swimming and wine and suntanning.

“Think about it,” Clint pushes. “We’re heading out tomorrow night. We can always leave you the address, if you decide you wanna come later. I mean, I totally get it if you don’t want to ride in a car with a screaming three-year-old for hours on end. I love the kid, but if I had a choice, I’d be right there with you.”

She does decide to come after finishing work, arriving at the beach via directions Clint has provided. It’s late into the evening, and dark clouds are heavy along the coastline, signaling the beginnings of a possible storm. Cooper has long been put to bed, but Clint and Laura are drinking wine on the front porch of the rented beach house, and Laura greets her with a hug and a gentleness so unexpected that Natasha almost stumbles back down the stairs at her touch.

“So here’s the deal,” Clint says after Laura has gone inside to get changed, making sure to kiss him goodnight for good measure. “I gotta go away for awhile, and I need a favor.”

“You want me to feed your dog?” Natasha asks dryly, even though she knows Clint doesn’t have a dog, even though she’s told him time and time again that maybe he should get one.

“Ha. No. I need you to keep a watch on Laura and Cooper while I’m gone.”

Natasha gives him a sidelong glance. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you need me to watch your family like I’m some sort of security detail? You go away all the time.”

“Just do it,” Clint says a little more strongly than Natasha thinks the question merits. “Please?”

She doesn’t know what to say -- she doesn’t know what she _can_ say, because at some point, Laura has found out that her favorite midnight snack is celery and peanut butter, and Cooper has patted her knee and asked her to read a story, and there’s a third adult place setting at the table in the farmhouse all the time.

“Okay,” she relents, because she’s driven for hours without stopping and she hasn’t eaten all day and the small amount of alcohol is making her dizzy. “But don’t make me take your kid to school or something. I’m not driving a minivan.”

“Really, Natasha. Not _all_ suburban families drive minivans.”

“You’re not a suburban family, you’re a farm family,” Natasha points out, because Clint and Laura own a truck and they also own a purple minivan. Clint grunts.

“We’ll figure something out.”

 

(Natasha doesn’t tell anyone about the conversations she had with herself, the one-sided exchanges she internalized on the way to Calcutta, the ones where she told Laura that Clint was dead. When Laura asks her if she was scared, she answers, _no, I had no time to be scared. I had to focus on making sure he came home. And I knew he was going to come home._

“I can’t pretend it won’t happen,” Laura says as they watch over a sleeping Lila, feverish from the flu, and that’s the day she shows Natasha their will, the one that Clint updates every time he goes on a mission.

“We could add your name,” Laura suggests during a quiet moment. “Actually, we were thinking about it. But we didn’t want to do it without asking, first.”

Natasha doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t want to be responsible for anything that might be left to her, whether it’s money or a house or a piece of jewelry. But she loves Clint and Laura, and she loves them in a way that she’s never loved anyone else, and she loves Cooper and Lila and she would do anything to protect them.

“I’d rather not.”

Laura’s hurt is palpable, but she nods. Natasha strokes Lila’s hair, kisses her forehead, and doesn’t leave her side until her fever has completely broken.)

 

After they come home from vacation, Natasha keeps her promise. She watches Cooper, and reads books about mermaids and dragons and spies. She watches Laura, who makes her breakfast and lunch and dinner. One day, instead of coffee, Laura hands Natasha a credit card for one hundred dollars.

“I think it’s time you got yourself some nice things,” Laura explains, pressing the plastic into Natasha’s hand. She stares dumbfounded at her open palm.

“I have my own clothes,” she protests, and Laura nods.

“I know,” she says simply. “But you can buy yourself more. And if you have too many things, you can start leaving them here. You don’t _really_ want to wear all my old maternity stuff every time you visit, do you?”

Natasha shakes her head. “I can’t accept this.”

“I’m not asking if you _can_ ,” Laura says with a smile, walking away to finish dinner.

Clint returns to the farm within the week, while Laura is out running errands with Cooper. His arm is in a sling and his hair is messy and his face is covered in dirt, and Natasha is in the middle of doing yoga exercises when he walks through the door.

“Jesus, Clint. What the hell happened?”

“Old friends,” Clint explains as he limps into the house. “They weren’t too happy to see me.”

“No shit.” She leads him upstairs and into the bathroom and makes him sit on the toilet seat. She dips a cloth in warm water, cleaning the open gash on his forehead in the same careful manner she’d cleaned up Cooper when he had fallen off his tricycle and skinned his knee two days earlier.

“Eyes up,” she instructs as his lids start to droop, signaling exhaustion. He manages a grin as she prods the injury with gentle fingers.

“You gonna kiss it and make it all better?”

Natasha rolls her eyes and punches his good shoulder lightly. “You wish.” But then she does find herself bending over the kissing him lightly on dirty, filthy hair that’s full of ash and sweat, because she’s missed him more than she wants to admit.

“Thanks, by the way. For staying. And watching.” He nods towards the closed bathroom door. “Pretty sure this is first time I’ve left home for something and haven’t been worried about my family while I’m gone.”

Natasha swallows down a lump in her throat and gently wipes more blood off his skin, watching the red stain her hands. She realizes this is also the first time she’s been away from him and from SHIELD and hasn’t been worried about how to spend her time or felt worried about where she belonged.

“Anytime.”

 

* * *

 

Natasha lands the quinjet in a field outside of Crawford, Mississippi. Natasha and Clint decide to go home; Steve and Sam and Scott decide to regroup with Wanda, who Clint seems hesitant to leave.

“You need to go,” Wanda says quietly, pulling long sleeves over her wrists and bitten-down black polish. “You need your time with your family.” Natasha had lent the other girl her shirt, keeping her jacket buttoned up, but Clint remained in his sky-blue prison uniform, and it’s a look that makes Natasha feel uncomfortable. “Send me a message when it is okay for me to come. I will be fine with everyone else until then. I promise.”

Clint makes her promise again, and tells her she can call him anytime if she needs it, and Natasha resists the urge to remind Clint he’s not her father. Natasha slowly pulls him away, and they find their way towards a beat-up Honda Accord that looks like it’s seen better days. They key is taped under the hood with a note from Maria Hill and Clint elects to drive so that he has something to do, because hours on a quinjet and in a jail cell have made him antsy.

“You didn’t offer her an apple,” Natasha says as they pass a speed limit sign, and Clint cracks the barest of smiles.

“Apples are for people who break their legs and spit in my face.”

They drive through the dark Midwestern roads, until they pull off the highway to stop at a shitty motel with creaking beds and doors that barely lock. Clint falls asleep within minutes, passed out over the covers while snoring loudly, and when Natasha wakes up thanks to the thin bed dipping and groaning underneath her, it’s barely light out.

She doesn’t see him in the room, and is concerned until she finds him sitting outside the door of the motel, pressed up against the wall. It’s too cold to be outside without some sort of jacket and so she cozies up against him, sharing body heat.

“Can’t sleep?”

“I can,” Clint says, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I just don’t want to.”

“Oh.” She suddenly realizes she doesn’t know what to say. She hasn’t seen him since they fought at the airport. She hasn’t been back to the farm for three weeks, two days, and four hours. She thinks about offering him some sort of barter, like a cigarette or a drink or even a kiss. She thinks about how Clint once told her she wasn’t in the Red Room anymore, and she didn’t need to work like that, and realizes how long ago that was. She thinks about what he had told her Loki said before he took his mind.

_“He said...he said I have heart.”_

“Stark came to see us,” he says after a long moment. “He mentioned my family. He just...he said it, out loud, to anyone that could hear. I don’t know if anyone _did_ hear.” He drops his gaze, and Natasha puts her hand on his back.

He had asked her, after everything, if she knew what it was like to be unmade, to have all your secrets and dreams and your most private moments unraveled from your mind, to have everything you knew in the possession of someone else, to have someone else’s hands in your brain. She had answered, _“you know that I do.”_

What she should have said was, “ _it’s the only thing I know.”_

 

* * *

  

Clint and Natasha make it back to the farm after another long day of driving, one meal at Red Robin, two bathroom breaks, three arguments over radio station preferences, one almost flat tire thanks to Clint driving over a rusty nail in the dirt road, and one stop at Target for new clothes so that Clint can fully rid himself of his prison uniform. He stops the car at the base of the long driveway, well before the crooked wooden fence, and Natasha wonders if he’s thinking of the first time he brought her here so many years ago.

“In the eye of the hurricane, there is quiet,” Clint intones as he stares up at his house after getting out of the car. Natasha puts an arm around his shoulders and helps him walk up the driveway, and the door flies open when he reaches the porch.

 

( _What did it show you, Agent Barton?_

After New York, Natasha will learn this in a dark room lit only by scented candles and spare moonlight: Clint never told Loki about Laura, or the farm, or Cooper and Lila.

_Barton told me everything._

“Not everything,” Natasha reminds him, easing the alcohol bottle out of his hand. He’s got a firm grip on the neck but she’s seen this before. She knows his layers, now. Hers are broken and brittle and made up of scars and war wounds. His are hard and heavy and made up of scars and liquor. They stay up longer, which she considers impressive, but now that she knows where the weakest points are, they always come down once she figures out how to make them crumble.)

 

“Daddy!”

Lila wraps small hands around one leg and Cooper wraps bigger arms around his other leg and Nate burps, spitting up on his clothes, and blurts out, “da!” Laura stands still with tears in her eyes and Natasha notices Clint’s face is a mirror of her emotions.

“Sorry I’m a fugitive,” Clint mumbles as Natasha takes the baby from Laura’s arms, allowing her to hug him tightly. She finds herself fighting back tears and tries to focus on the children who won’t let go of their father’s legs.

“I don’t care,” Laura says, her voice muffled against his shoulder. “You’re home.”

 

* * *

  

Bruce Banner is the last person Natasha expects to see when she opens the door of her designated room in Stark Tower, and she almost closes it in his face in surprise.

“If you’re looking for Clint, he went for bagels,” she says, because Clint and Bruce had somehow bonded over New York delicacies in a way that made Natasha roll her eyes. Bruce shakes his head.

“I came for you.”

“Me?”

Bruce nods. “Can I come in?”

Natasha hesitates and then nods, opening the door wider. “Free country. Free room.”

Bruce walks inside, carefully closing the door, and regards her carefully. “Worried that I’m going to Hulk out on you?”

Natasha swallows, because she is, even though he’s given her no reason to think otherwise, thanks to controlled rage exercises and training exercises over the past year since he’d moved into Stark Tower.

“If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be a good spy.”

Bruce laughs nervously, and sits down. Natasha offers him tea, because Laura did that all the time when someone came to visit, and it’s the only thing she knows how to do. Steve is a friend and Clint is more than a friend, and Tony she can treat like a brother and Thor is never really around long enough for her to care. But Bruce is fragile and Bruce is tentative and Bruce isn’t any of those things to her yet. Bruce is someone who tried to kill her.

“I, uh. I was thinking about what you said to me. When we met for the first time.”

Natasha furrows her brow, trying to replay the conversation in her mind. She had been so focused on getting out of that tiny shack alive and so focused on finding Clint that she barely remembers what they had talked about other than the Tesseract. “What did I say?”

“I asked you if you started that young. As a spy.” Bruce nods towards her. “You said that you did.”

Natasha swallows down a memory that seems like it should no longer be able to overwhelm her. “Yes,” she says quietly, turning on the Keurig machine Tony’s put in their room, because Clint would have thrown a fit if he didn’t have at least one coffee maker at his disposal. “I did.”

 

(After Ultron, Fury brings her reports of every surveillance photo he can find. Some marks look like the quinjet. Other marks look like spots of dust on the lens of a video camera. A few look like they could be birds, or maybe a commercial plane.

“Did I tell you I was the one who recruited Banner?” Natasha asks while sitting on the couch with Laura. Clint’s putting the kids to sleep, and Natasha feels like she needs comfort, and Laura has always allowed her to sit up with them when she needs to feel safe.

“Is that where you fell in love?” Laura asks gently, and the question is filled with all the understanding of a mother who is talking to a child about something they might not be aware of.

“Love is for children,” Natasha says, because it is, because the only people she really loves are in the house she’s staying in. “I never loved him. But I did care about him.”)

 

In a hollow gym, at the far end of the wall, Bruce is a green giant of strength and anger who is pressed into a corner, howling with rage and unbridled fury. Natasha stands a few yards away, straight and rigid; she’s holding her ground but she’s also mapped out every single escape route and noted every crevice she can jump or run to if things take a wrong turn.

“Embrace your fear, but find your grounding inside of you,” she calls out. “It’s there. I promise.” The Hulk turns and growls, and spits in her direction. His eyes look the same and she can see Bruce in his face, but it’s not Bruce. It’s a monster.

Natasha was never scared of monsters, though. She sympathized with monsters because she was one, a killing machine who got lost in her own head and didn’t understand her own motives. Humans were what she was scared of. Humans were the ones who could do real damage. Monsters, the Red Room taught her, could be controlled. And if she could control herself, it meant she could control someone else, too.

Natasha continues walking forward, slow steps and measured breaths, and by the time she’s close enough to touch him he’s curled in on himself, green becoming grey, bulging muscles becoming thin arms. Natasha reaches out and puts a hand on his back and when he looks up, he’s Bruce Banner again, and she finds herself softening at the look in his eyes, the look that reminds her so much of herself once upon a time.

“It’s okay, big guy. We’ll get there.” She smiles to herself, thinking of Clint. “I did.”

 

* * *

 

Wanda comes to the farm two weeks after Clint has come home. Natasha hasn’t left except to run errands, and she offers to pick Wanda up at the bus station in Waverly before breakfast.

“How are you doing?” she asks as they drive through town. Wanda looks a little better, the color returning to her face, her hair brighter and longer than it had been when they left her in Mississippi.

“I do not know.”

The answer is perfunctory and sad, and Natasha decides that’s okay, because she doesn’t think any of them know. She puts her hand on Wanda’s knee and they sit together in silence until they reach the farm.

“If it was not for Clint, I would still be in that building,” Wanda says, and for a moment, Natasha doesn’t know if she’s talking about the Avengers compound or the Raft. “I would not have been locked up.”

“Yes,” Natasha agrees, because if it wasn’t for Clint, she would still be running along rooftops and digging knives in people’s guts and shrugging off desperate pleas of survival as if they were simple requests. “But you also would have been alone.”

 

(A month after Sokovia falls, Natasha finds Wanda standing on the balcony of New Avengers Facility, looking lost.

“Trouble sleeping?” she asks lightly as she comes up beside her and Wanda glances over to meet her eyes.

“They tell me I can fly.” Wanda turns her gaze towards the sky, and fingers the ring Clint had gifted her with before he left for home, an infinity loop of promises neverending. “ _He_ tells me I can fly.”

“He’s right,” Natasha says, thinking of apples and broken legs and the man who believed someone could be something more than a weapon, because he had a heart.

“No,” Wanda says, shaking her head, looking down at her feet. “I don’t think I can.”

“You can,” Natasha refutes, because somewhere along the line, it’s become her job to be the one that people look up to. Somewhere along the line, Laura asks her for parenting advice, and Cooper asks about girls, and Lila asks about school. Tony asks her to look after Bruce because he knows she can handle a monster in the field, and Steve asks her to lead the New Avengers because he knows she can set an example.)

 

Wanda gets out of the car and looks out over the trees; there’s a wind coming in from the north, chilly and biting, and Natasha feels the cold sear her soul.

“It feels good, here.”

Natasha nods. “I know. It always does.”

Wanda sighs to herself. “I do not know who I am supposed to be,” she says softly. “Not right now. I thought I did. I thought I had figured myself out, but...I realized I do not know all of my layers. Not yet.”

Natasha thinks of all the things she has been so far, the things she might still get a chance to be, the opportunities and roads that are stretched before her like endless promises of redemption the same way the sky seems to last forever, and for the first time, she thinks she might be okay with that.

“Neither do I.”

Wanda gives her a small smile and walks further away from the car, her toes curling into the grass. Natasha turns around and sees Clint standing at the window of his bedroom, palms pressed against the glass like a ghost. She looks back at Wanda, who is standing in the middle of the lawn, staring up at the house, at the place where Natasha knows Clint is watching. Red energy spurts from her hands, like the propulsion jets of a spaceship trying to find its balance.

Under the farmhouse sky, Natasha watches Wanda shake the past from her hands, and fly.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me (or yell at me) and my writing on [tumblr.](http://isjustprogress.tumblr.com)


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